Absent
by Mustardlover16
Summary: Set during Season 8 after Bones' return. Just a short one shot about Booth and Brennan learning to cope with her absence.


Watching her go was the hardest thing I ever had to watch. Her leaving me, driving away-that gave me more nightmares than Afghanistan ever did. Of course, _of course,_ I knew she had to do it, I still know that, but that sort of thing doesn't really register in the moment. In the moment is just full of the processing-the emotions. I'm an in the moment sort of guy, you know? War, near-death-experiences, love, they all will do that to a guy. Those are the sort of things that make you too busy or too scared or too involved to worry much about the future, right? Just a million miles an hour, full steam ahead, we'll know when we get there sort of lifestyle. I don't know... I guess, well-I mean, I guess it's always worked like that for me.

It's weird though. I didn't just have nightmares of her riding off with her dad while she was gone. While Bones was physically gone, she was everywhere in my head. I had nightmares of her screaming my name. Nightmares of pulling her out of a buried car just _seconds_ too late. Nightmares of bullets hitting her chest not mine, of tornadoes sweeping her off and dropping her lifeless body, of her corpse being one of my cases, of her catching a cell phone just as a .22 brakes the skylight of the Jeffersonian.

Endless. Thoughts and fears and wishes and hopes of her were endless. It was useless to try to put those things out of my mind. So useless Sweets never even suggested it. No one did. They just left me to my thoughts. Or they tried to at least plant good thoughts and memories in my head. Cam would bring by information about the case file and remind me that, "She's going to be fine, Booth. Max will take care of her." Except that didn't help any because _that_ -taking care of her- _that_ was supposed to be my job now, my responsibility. Angela stopped by the house sometimes and we'd just talk about Bones. She told me the story of how the two first met, things they did, things Angela tried to do to, "normalize" Bones. We'd smile in a strained manner, maybe even chuckle if we'd drunk a little more wine than usual, but in the end, it only hurt because she had a spouse and a child to return home to and tuck in and kiss and I didn't.

Eventually I thought I was forgetting what Christine and Bones looked like. I'd start wondering was her hair red-brown or brown-red? Did it even have a red tinge? One day I was so stir-crazy, so spazzed out that I pulled out every photo album I had and pulled all the pictures out. There weren't enough, though. We hadn't done much scrap-booking. Neither of us was into that, it was just things Angela had made for us. So then I went searching through our electronics, every cell phone, laptop, camera and I put all the photos on a thumb drive and I whizzed over to Walgreens and made a copy of every single digital I had. Most were of Christine.

I never realized how few pictures there were of Bones. The ones I did have, though, they...They were torture. They were so photogenic, so beautiful, but never bright enough. They were always too dull, no matter how much lighting or color editing was done to them. But they were all I had. So, I put them everywhere. I stuck pictures of my family everywhere I could imagine. Bathroom mirrors, pin boards, window above the sink, mantlepiece. So many on the mantle. Desk, kitchen counter, bedroom, nightstand, a particularly beautiful shot of Bones cradling Christine, looking down at her and smiling in my Bible. An artsy shot of Bones and I at some nameless monkey-suit-and-tie meet and greet taken by Angela taped to my computer screen at the office.

Sweets would probably say it was sort of therapeutic to me. See, I couldn't go a single place in the house without seeing them, photos or no. Now no one else could, either. More poetic than therapeutic to me but, hey, I'm not the one who blew loads of money on a PhD in psychology.

Even once she was back, I swear I had some sort of residual abandonment issues. Bones and I would tuck Christine in together, and then we'd sit on the couch and she'd read, with her feet in my lap, or we'd listen to music or watch TV together, but I'd find an excuse every ten minutes to get up and make sure Christine was still in her crib. And at night, I'd wake up ten or fifteen times just to see if Bones was still on her side of the bed.

"Booth. I am here. See? I'm here. I'm here and I'm healthy and I'm happy. Stop worrying." She said on one of my worst nights. We weren't much for spooning (rather, she wasn't) but it was one of my bad nights so she was tucked up against me, her spine pressed up against my chest, one of her hands holding mine in front of her body, the other sliding up and down my thigh in a tired but comforting way.

My breathing was a bit erratic, because, big surprise, I'd had another horrifying nightmare. So in stead of saying anything I just pressed my nose into her silky hair and tried to slow down my breathing and my heart rate, "So your adrenal glands will stop secreting," as Bones directed me to. But my breathing just wouldn't slow even though she threatened to make me breathe into a paper back like a nerd. So she rolled over to face me. She rested her long, strong hands on my cheeks and touched her forehead to mine and she stuck one of her legs in between mine, maximizing physical contact as much as possible. I opened my eyes to find her blue eyes piercingly steady.

"Booth." Was all she said. "Booth." She just kept whispering it over and over, calmly but in an urging tone, as if she was just waiting for me to hear her, like I was deaf and she was waiting for me to regain my sense of hearing. It was almost like that, too. I almost felt like I was deaf, mute, lame to the world around me, because I was panicking. How could I feel anything when I could lose them at any minute? How could I think straight knowing that they could be gone tomorrow, just like they were gone before, in a yellow taxi.

Bones pressed her lips to my forehead gently. They were dry and trembling slightly, which is what actually brought me to my senses. She was trembling. Strong, proud, resilient Bones, was trembling and just as scared as I was. My hands reached out to her wrists, even though her hands still pressed and patted and stroked at my cheeks. She stopped her incessant movements and clutched at my face as I clutched at her wrists. I gulped in a shallow, stuttering breath, and suddenly mine was not the only breathing that was shaky and ragged from emotion and fear.

"Feel this?" Bones's fingers stroked at my cheek bones. "Do you feel this?" Her voice was low and frightened. All I could do was nod. The pads of her thumbs kneaded softly at my skin, her nails scratched ever so lightly. Her breathe fanned out across my face warmly. "This is me. I am here. This is me, being here. I'm here, and I'm not going anywhere. I am staying with you, right here, as long as you want. There's nowhere to go, no reason to leave. I. Am. Here." She punctuated each word of the last sentence.

I choked back a sob as a shiver of relief made its way down my spine. "Bones."

"That's right, it's me, Bones. It's Brennan, Temperance Brennan. It's me."

"Oh, God, Bones. You're here. You're here, and you're safe? You're okay? We're okay?" I closed my eyes again, awaiting her answer. My only thoughts were: _She's here. She's here. Don't you hear her, she's here, stupid!_

 _"_ I'm here, Christine is here, and you're here. We're all healthy and safe and together. Christine's okay. You're not okay. And I'm not okay. We're both scared and broken and exhausted. But we will be, Booth, we will be okay. Because we're together, and safe and we have Christine, who's healthy and safe and okay. We will be okay."

I laughed at that. Not because it was funny, but because I was so relieved. The elephant that had been parked on my chest for months had finally stepped off and I could breathe without pain. I could think without a cloud blocking my vision and I could lay down in bed and feel the warmth of another person, here the voice of another person. The most important person. Bones.

The rest of the night Bones just talked to me about the things we always used to talk about. She talked about Christine and Angela, Max, Hodgins and Sweets. She didn't talk about things that weren't important, inconsequential things. That wasn't here style. She just talked lightly about the things that did matter and why they mattered and she kissed me, and held me until I kissed her and held her back, until I entered her conversation about all the things that mattered. And then we just laid there, in bed and looked at each other, because we hadn't done it enough recently. And we finally fell asleep. In the early hours of the morning I woke up, once again, but not out of fear. I woke up because I remembered that I didn't have enough pictures of Bones, so I got out of bed and grabbed my camera and took a picture of Bones, hair gently splayed out around her, body gently faced toward my side of the bed, her hand stretched out onto my pillow. Then I went to the small printer by my laptop and I printed out two copies, one for my wallet and one for my Bible.


End file.
